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Wednesday, September 6, 2017

So, I just published Tavern Slut #2: Mia the Contortionist on Amazon, and as I did in Tavern Slut #1 I did a lot of SF development for the story. It fits comfortably in the erotica genre, but it ALSO fits comfortably in the science fiction genre. And I'm here to talk about the SF development I did for the story.

And it fits in the SF and F Slavegirls subreddit because the tavern sluts in the stories are slavegirls who are not CALLED slavegirls. This is mostly to avoid Amazon's screwed-up censorship rules about nonconsensual sex. If not for Amazon, the characters would BE slavegirls, but instead I made the characters sex-positive women who are submissive and REALLY like sex and being dominated by the tavern customers. They wear shackles, cuffs and collars and nothing else when they serve, and they are almost always bound and/or gagged when they serve sexually. But they're not CALLED slave girls!

What I really wanted to focus on in the story was the use of nanotech and direct neural interfaces to enhance sexual pleasure. This topic has not been well explored. Phillip Jose Farmer wrote "The Flesh" back in the 1960s, the story of a man who winds up captured by a society that is very nearly woman-only, who has a pair of horns grafted onto his forehead that gives him the ability and the desire to have sex almost constantly, so he can impregnate lots and lots of women. It wasn't nanotech or DNI, but those didn't really exist in the 1960s, and it WAS manipulation of the protagonist's hormones for sexual reasons.

More recently, in 1990, Greg Bear wrote a novel called “Queen of Angels” that featured prostitutes who had vaginas growing in all sorts of unlikely places. The sexual pleasure aspects of the story weren't fully explored, it was more a police story about a search for a mass murderer. He was mostly just showing to what extremes some of the prostitutes in the society he was writing about went to, in order to please their clients. It was very minor.

But my dirty mind noticed it.

I wanted to do something a lot simpler and subtler. In Tavern Slut #1 I had created a society where almost everyone lived on Basic Income, and got their housing, transportation, medical, clothing and utilities taken care of them for free by the government. The main reason was to look at how Basic Income might work, but also to create an economic basis in which something like John Norman's paga taverns might make sense. I wrote about that here.

It occurred to me that there were a number of ways that nanotech and DNI could make things sexier for your average young adult. For example, nanotech could be used to alter a person's appearance. They've already got nanotech machines that can target and kill cancer cells.And they can already edit genes with tools like CRISPR.] So eventually it might be possible for scientists to create nanomachines that enter the body, maybe in pill form, maybe suspended in a liquid that you drink, that go to the appropriate spots in your body and send out amino acids that say “Grow half an inch shorter" or “enlarge breasts by 20 percent" or "change complexion to olive brown." With a variety of such changes, you wind up with a body that looks, not like you, but like your favorite actor, actress, singer, athlete, pornstar, whatever.

The protagonist of Tavern Slut #1 has chosen to look like Rachel Roxxy, a pornstar from ancient times about a century in the past. The protagonist of Tavern Slut #2 has chosen a “generic wholesome pornstar look." Any woman can be beautiful, any man can be handsome, and since that's classed as a health expense (to avoid the disastrous effects of lookism, you see) it's free.

So of course, everyone is handsome and/or beautiful. (Gender is also optional, though I don't dwell on that in my stories. The tech certainly offers plenty of options for those who want to.)

That's just so I can set up the stories so that my female characters are beautiful, and male characters who are their sex partners are beautiful/handsome. Looks are not a consideration.

The real fun began when I started thinking about how nanotech-enabled body mod and DNI could be used for sexual fun. I realized that it should also be possible to create nerve networks all over the body. Such as a network of sexual pleasure receptors inside the mouth and throat that I called the Oral Clit, to make blowjobs just as much fun for the giver as for the givee. Well, that along with the DeGagger app which completely suppresses the gag reflex, and the Jaw Comfort app that makes the jaw muscles loose and pain-free even if the mouth is held wide open for a very long time. Basically, anyone who has these apps is a Deep Throat machine.

Bound? Ring gagged? Helpless? The DeGagger is your friend!

And I imagined that there could be an Anal Clit as well, making buttfucking a lot more fun for the recipient.

The nice thing about these is that they don't alter the person's appearance, they're strictly internal mods that don't show at all. I have one character who has an augment called a “prehensile tongue” which makes the tongue so long that it has to be coiled in a spiral inside the mouth. The protagonist has considered it, but is creeped out by it.

I also imagined that it would be good for the people who had these "augments" as I called them, to control them. Having a clit in your mouth that you can't control is just asking for a slew of new and bizarre eating disorders, and having a clit in your butt that you can't control just doesn't bear thinking about.

That … well, that and a few other places … is where the DNI came in. And DNI is far enough along that it is getting some serious money thrown at it by none other than Elon Musk. I figured that like a lot of other technologies, DNI would appropriate the forms of older technologies when it was first implemented. Specifically, it would have a user interface a lot like the desktop on your computer where you could access its various features. The user interface wouldn't exist in any real physical way, it simply would be an image that you could see anytime by willing it into existence, and control by willing the various features to operate. It's called a "braintop" in my story.

The DNI interface can be used to turn the various augments and apps installed in a person's body/mind on and off at will, so that a person could eat normally, and do other stuff normally, too. Or do them abnormally, if you like.

It could also be used to provide detailed information about the functions of the user's augments and apps. For example, Mia being a contortionist, has a contortionist augment inside her body that keeps her joints limber and loose and also thickens and protects them where useful. There's also a contortionist app that lets her see exactly how much strain her joints and muscles have been put to, which helps prevent injury.

Here's a beautiful contortionist bound in a Viennese oyster and having a very good time. Imagine if she had the contortionist apps in my story!

But where a DNI interface could come in very handy is in its ability to transfer information back and forth between two sex partners. Say, all the input from one partner's Oral Clit going to their partner, who is sending all the sensations from the blowjob (or pussy licking) they're experiencing right back to the person giving it.

It's quite the feedback loop and would probably make sex even MORE fun for both partners. In my story it's called the Mutual Pleasure app. There's also another DNI-based app in my story called Orgasm Synch that's used in conjunction with the Mutual Pleasure app.

There are a lot of refinements that I could think of to make the sex apps more powerful (such as a Whole Brain Meld for maximum intimacy during sex). But I didn't go there, because I wanted to keep the tech relatable to viewers. I wanted to put it in the familiar terms of apps and braintops so people could understand it as something they might actually have.

I also wanted to keep the scope limited because going further gets away from my desire to just focus on the fun and sexy aspects of these technologies. There are some very scary and potentially horrific uses that nanotech bodymod and DNI interfaces can be put to, particularly DNI. (Vernor Vinge explores one horrific near-future issue called YGBM (“You Gotta Believe Me!”) in his book “Rainbow's End” and Charles Stross follows it all the way down the rabbit hole in a distant future book called “Glasshouse,” though Harlan Ellison beat them both to the punch in his famous story, “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.”) I'm staying away from those, if only because they are only erotic to the deeply disturbed. And I prefer writing for the MILDLY disturbed, dammit!

Just because I have envisioned these potential applications for DNI and nanotech doesn't mean I think they are inevitable. There's a long way between the advances I've cited and actual commercial applications I describe in my story. If the accelerated pace of technological change tells us anything, it's that tech can get hung up on the way to success (hello, carbon nanotubes!) and sometimes never makes it out of the lab. But it's not my job as a science fiction writer to predict what WILL happen in the future, only to describe what MIGHT happen in the future. And if in doing so I inspire some scientist or engineer to innovate and create products similar to what I describe, why, that will be all to the good.